My city feels like a crime scene and
the criminals are all melting into the night, fleeing the scene. No, I'm
not talking about the kids in black who smashed windows and burned cop
cars on Saturday.

I'm talking about the heads of state who, on Sunday night, smashed
social safety nets and burned good jobs in the middle of a recession.
Faced with the effects of a crisis created by the world's wealthiest and
most privileged strata, they decided to stick the poorest and most
vulnerable people in their countries with the bill.

How else can we interpret the G20's final communique, which includes not
even a measly tax on banks or financial transactions, yet instructs
governments to slash their deficits in half by 2013. This is a huge and
shocking cut, and we should be very clear who will pay the price:
students who will see their public educations further deteriorate as
their fees go up; pensioners who will lose hard-earned benefits;
public-sector workers whose jobs will be eliminated. And the list goes
on. These types of cuts have already begun in many G20 countries
including Canada, and they are about to get a lot worse.

They are happening for a simple reason. When the G20 met in London in
2009, at the height of the financial crisis, the leaders failed to band
together to regulate the financial sector so that this type of crisis
would never happen again. All we got was empty rhetoric, and an
agreement to put trillions of dollars in public monies on the table to
shore up the banks around the world. Meanwhile the U.S. government did
little to keep people in their homes and jobs, so in addition to
hemorrhaging public money to save the banks, the tax base collapsed,
creating an entirely predictable debt and deficit crisis.

At this weekend's summit, Prime Minister Stephen Harper convinced his
fellow leaders that it simply wouldn't be fair to punish those banks
that behaved well and did not create the crisis (despite the fact that
Canada's highly protected banks are consistently profitable and could
easily absorb a tax). Yet somehow these leaders had no such concerns
about fairness when they decided to punish blameless individuals for a
crisis created by derivative traders and absentee regulators.

Last week, The Globe and Mail published a
fascinating article about the origins of the G20. It turns out the
entire concept was conceived in a meeting back in 1999 between then
finance minister Paul Martin and his U.S. counterpart Lawrence Summers
(itself interesting since Mr. Summers was at that time playing a central
role in creating the conditions for this financial crisis allowing a
wave of bank consolidation and refusing to regulate derivatives).

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The two men wanted to expand the G7, but only to countries they
considered strategic and safe. They needed to make a list but apparently
they didn't have paper handy. So, according to reporters John Ibbitson
and Tara Perkins, "the two men grabbed a brown manila envelope, put it
on the table between them, and began sketching the framework of a new
world order." Thus was born the G20.

The story is a good reminder that history is shaped by human decisions,
not natural laws. Mr. Summers and Mr. Martin changed the world with the
decisions they scrawled on the back of that envelope. But there is
nothing to say that citizens of G20 countries need to take orders from
this hand-picked club.

Already, workers, pensioners and students have taken to the streets
against austerity measures in Italy, Germany, France, Spain and Greece,
often marching under the slogan: "We won't pay for your crisis." And
they have plenty of suggestions for how to raise revenues to meet their
respective budget shortfalls.

Many are calling for a financial transaction tax that would slow down
hot money and raise new money for social programs and climate change.
Others are calling for steep taxes on polluters that would underwrite
the cost of dealing with the effects of climate change and moving away
from fossil fuels. And ending losing wars is always a good cost-saver.

The G20 is an ad hoc institution with none of the legitimacy of the
United Nations. Since it just tried to stick us with a huge bill for a
crisis most of us had no hand in creating, I say we take a cue from Mr.
Martin and Mr. Summers. Flip it over, and write on the back of the
envelope: Return to sender.

http://www.naomiklein.org

Naomi Klein is the author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, now out in paperback. To read all her latest writing visit www.naomiklein.org